ECO-CONGREGATION

Auchterhouse Church is registered as an Eco-Congregation with Eco Congregation Scotland which is an ecumenical movement helping local groups of Christians link environmental issues to their faith, reduce their environmental impact and engage with the community.

The vision of the Eco-Congregation movement is:

· A Scotland that cares for God’s creation, now and forever more.

Its mission is:

· To discover what it means to care for God’s creation In prayer, worship and conversation.

· To put that care into action individually, locally, nationally and globally, desiring to live justly in a transformed world.

· To commit ourselves to campaigning on urgent threats to the web of life in our vulnerable world.

These may sound daunting statements but in reality we have all taken the first steps by enjoying the lovely countryside around us. As gardeners or farmers we already have a good understanding of the amazing way that God’s creation works throughout the seasons.

What we have done in Auchterhouse is to assess where we are now and what steps we can begin to take to gradually fulfil some of these aspirations. Our planet is very precious to us all, in providing the air, the water and the food we all need to live now and in the future. We are small congregations individually, but working together perhaps we can unite to achieve some of these increasingly important actions.

The newsletters from Eco-Congregation Scotland can be found under the "News" section of our website.

Global Warming

The year 2014 now ranks as the warmest on record since 1880, according to an analysis by NASA scientists.

This video, published on 16 January 2016, shows a time series of five-year global temperature averages, mapped from 1880 to 2014, as estimated by scientists at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York.

While scientists expect temperatures to fluctuate from year to year, the average temperature of the planet as a whole has warmed by about 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit (0.8 degrees Celsius) since 1880. This trend is largely driven by increasing human emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

The GISS analysis incorporates temperature measurements from 6,300 weather stations around the world, ship- and buoy-based ocean temperature readings and data from Antarctic research stations. These measurements are plugged into an algorithm that then estimates average global temperature. The computer code for this process is freely available for download from the GISS web site.

Carbon Dioxide Emissions

An ultra-high-resolution NASA computer model has given scientists a stunning new look at how carbon dioxide in the atmosphere travels around the globe.